Coping with Divorce, Single Parenting, and Remarriage: A Risk and Resiliency Perspective

Coping with Divorce, Single Parenting, and Remarriage: A Risk and Resiliency Perspective

Synopsis

In this volume leading researchers offer an interesting and accessible overview of what we now know about risk and protective factors for family functioning and child adjustment in different kinds of families. They explore interactions among individual, familial, and extrafamilial risk and protective factors in an attempt to explain the great diversity in parents' and children's responses to different kinds of experiences associated with marriage, divorce, life in a single parent household, and remarriage. br

Excerpt

This book is comprised of chapters written by some of the leading researchers studying single-parent families, divorce, and remarriage. Authors were asked to write chapters that were interesting and accessible not only to other researchers but also to nonresearch professionals working with children such as psychiatrists, pediatricians, social workers, clinical psychologists, family therapists, and educators. Hence, some of the more complex data analyses found in journal chapters are not presented in detail in these chapters. The chapters included in this volume are, for the most part, based on programmatic research and studies based both on large-scale surveys and on smaller studies involving multiple methods and multiple measures that include observations, standardized tests and questionnaires, interviews, and multiple informants. The conclusions of authors are sometimes not in accord, and in reading the chapters it is instructive to think about the strengths and limitations of different methodologies and the kinds of questions different methodologies are best able to answer.

The authors take a risk and resiliency approach in examining family functioning and child adjustment in different kinds of families. The interactions among individual, familial, and extrafamilial risk and protective factors are explored in an attempt to explain the great diversity in parents' and children's responses to different kinds of experiences associated with marriage, divorce, life in a single- parent household, and remarriage.

These topics have become increasingly important in the United States as demographics relating to marriage and childbearing have changed. Marriage is being delayed; cohabitation, births to single mothers, and divorce have increased. Although about 75% of men and 66% of women eventually remarry, the remarriage . . .